For the question: "making money from open source", the answer is, rightly, a
lot of times: sell services. For others, it is "use software to drive sales
of your hardware or as a total solution".
However, for corporations, they tend to want having the cake and eating it
too: they way people to contribute to their software, give it for free, yet
retain copyright on it and sell proprietary licenses. MySQL (before
Sun/Oracle) was of that mind set, and made people sign agreements that
assign the copyright of the contributor to them so they can do just that.
Of late, I have seen some companies obsessing about the GPL being bad for
business and wanting to do a BSD license because it is "business friendly"
(in the sense that they are not obliged to open portions of the product, or
close source and open product [e.g. Apple's kernel]). So this is MBA vs.
Developers/open source advocates that will be with us for some time.
Hence, the "sell services" argument does not fly with this crowd. The poster
on OpenSolaris says the "support model" has commercially failed with Open
Solaris.
But, looking at the discussion for some more, I can see the following:
1. It is on the OpenSolaris list, not any MySQL list. So those who use
OpenSolaris are the ones addressed here, not others.
2. The email address of the person posting this is not @oracle.com, so I am
not sure if even Oracle is the one asking that question at all, or someone
putting a call to arms for this. Moreover, earlier in the thread, there is
this disclaimer
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1621444&cid=31876156
And he himself confirms it here
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1621444&cid=31876224
So, tempest in a teapot here. Irrelevant to MySQL (for now).
--
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. -- Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. -- Leonardo da Vinci
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